How Starting Over After a Lost Helps to Find Your Safe Place

Dates are important to me. I marked my divorce by a date. My marriage to the love of my life by a date. I even dated the time I decided I would leave an abusive religion and relationship. This was a monumental decision. 

Because whatever time I have upon this earth was given to me to decide its course. So, I decided I could start over when ever I wanted to. 

Instead of waiting until January 1^st to set a floating goal I would usually reinvent each year under the whispered intent, “This time I’ll do it,” I made myself a promise to do it now. When it matters most I assure you that you will find every reason to stay wherever you are regardless of the abuse and anguish. You, like me will be more willing to live in nightmarish situation for convenience that never really exists. This is what I do. 

1. Choose the next date.
2. Be absolutely honest with myself.
3. SEE the clear picture of where I will be a month or year from now if I did not take these steps.
4. Respect my very real emotions.
5. Be loyal to myself.
6. Realize I deserve to be happy.
7. Define what happiness is. If I don’t know what happiness is then how will I know when I have achieved it?
8. I give myself time to grieve. There will be pain associated with this change.
9. Ask yourself if you give up this how will it feel to gain that?
10. Behave from a divine perspective. See yourself as deserving of God’s grace.
11. Allow yourself to be healed.
12. Write your problems, the things needing change in black on piece of plain paper. Burn it! Say good bye. Express gratitude for all you learned from the experience. 

When you give yourself the deserving freedom to be the self you deserve and crave a feeling of tearful joy will flow. A reunion. You will have touched your center. Your refuge. Your safe place for all of your energy.

When ever you feel a tendency to doubt yourself draw upon this goodness. When you do this you will then be able to embrace the real authentic you fearlessly and courageously.

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A respected life strategist, Jim is both inspired and inspiring with a pin point ability to see through to the core of the issues at hand and to address them straight on. It is his instinct and intuition, honed over 25 years of consulting and coaching private clients, that truly sets him apart. Jim’s spirit and delivery are impeccably delivered in a no nonsense manner resulting in maximum results.   

 

Jim’s passion for overcoming emotional fears was born of personal tragedy. He lived in his car following the divorce of his marriage of 30 years. In overcoming the legacy of this terrifying life stopping experience, Jim developed the principles and resources that he would later use to heal himself and so many others. 

Today, Jim is a management consultant and speaker to leading companies. His past clients are: Whirlpool Corporation, MITRE and Lush Cosmetics. To have Jim speak to your organization or work with you privately contact him at 719-649-4118 or email.

 

Study of the Day: Women Are Much Happier When Men Feel Their Pain

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According to recent research, men and women derive satisfaction from their partner's ability to empathize in vastly different ways.

Everett Collection/Shutterstock

PROBLEM: How do men and women in relationships value their significant other's ability to empathize?

 

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METHODOLOGY: Researchers led by Harvard Medical School's Shiri Cohen recruited 156 heterosexual couples and recorded statements from each participant about a recent incident with his or her partner that was particularly frustrating, disappointing, or upsetting. Then, after reuniting the couples and playing back the statements, they videotaped the pairs for 10 minutes as they tried to come to a better understanding of their problems.

Following the discussions, the subjects watched the videotape and simultaneously rated their negative and positive emotions throughout. Using these ratings, the authors selected and showed the most emotionally charged clips to the participants and had them complete questionnaires about their sentiments during each segment. They also measured the participants' overall satisfaction with their relationships as well as their perceptions of their partner's feelings.

RESULTS: Relationship satisfaction among the men was tied to their ability to read their partner's positive emotions accurately. The women's happiness in their romances, on the other hand, was associated with their partner's ability to correctly read their negative emotions.

CONCLUSION: Men like to know when their wife or girlfriend is happy while women really want the man in their life to know when they are not. Cohen explains in a statement: "It could be that for women, seeing that their male partner is upset reflects some degree of the man's investment and emotional engagement in the relationship, even during difficult times."

SOURCE: The full study, "Eye of the Beholder: The Individual and Dyadic Contributions of Empathic Accuracy and Perceived Empathic Effort to Relationship Satisfaction" (PDF), is published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

via theatlantic.com

Thank you for visiting my blog. Jim

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. Jim is board president of a charter school located in Colorado Springs whose sole purpose is to prepare otherwise disadvantaged students more competitively for college. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.   

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You Can Do This: How to Turn a Failure Into Success

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Illustration: Brett Ryder

To fail is divine—our life coach has, repeatedly, and she has nothing to show for it except freedom, serenity, and a surefire recipe for success.

I spent at least half my childhood drawing. By the time I got to college and signed up for my first drawing class, I was pretty comfortable with a pencil. My teacher was a brilliant draftsman named Will Reimann. To impress him, I fired up all my best tricks: lots of varied lines, fade-outs, soft gradients. One day while I was drawing, something landed on my sketch pad. It was a mechanical drafting pen.

"Use that from now on," said Mr. Reimann. And he smiled the smile of a man who has hatched an evil plot.

Oh, how I hated that damn pen! It drew a stark black line of unvarying thickness, making all my faboo pencil techniques impossible. You'd think my teacher would've been helpful, or at least forgiving. But no. He'd glance at my awkward ink drawings, groan "Oh, God," and walk away holding his head in his hands, like a migraine sufferer. My art grade plummeted. I writhed with frustration. A few weeks later, as I sat in another class taking notes with the Loathsome Pen of Doom, something happened. Without my intention, my hand started dancing with that horrible pen. Together, they began making odd marks: hatches, overlapping circles, patches of stippling.

The next drawing I completed won a juried art show. "How did you figure out a drafting pen could do this?" one of the judges asked me.

"I failed," I told them. "Over and over again."

Since then I've had many occasions to celebrate failure, in myself and in others. From my life-coaching seat, I've noticed that the primary difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that the successful people fail more. If you see failure as a monster stalking you, or one that has already ruined your life, take another look. That monster can become a benevolent teacher, opening your mind to successes you cannot now imagine.

via oprah.com

Learning to Speak Up and Get What You Want

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Illustration: Guy Billout

Hanging back, dropping hints, and generally mousing around gets you nowhere and drives other people nuts. Here's what you should do instead.

"I want my husband to have more sex with me," a girlfriend remarks at lunch. "I feel like he rarely initiates it, and I want to do it more often."

"Did you tell him how you feel?" I ask, after the waiters have administered strong smelling salts and propped me back in my chair. "Don't you think that the first step might be saying that to him instead of me?"

"Honestly, I could never," she responds. "He would assume I was dissatisfied or accuse me of being a nag. But I've been buying lots of silk lingerie and sheer little nighties and making sure I look my best at bedtime, hoping to pique his interest. Besides, it's not like I necessarily want to have more sex per se, I just want him to want me to."

Right. So, she wants sex, but she doesn't want it. She merely wants her husband to want it so she can get what she wants—which, perversely, is something she doesn't particularly want. Wouldn't it cost less, both in mental and actual currency, if she were to sit out the dance, look him plain in the eye, and speak her mind? Why can't she say what she wants?

She's afraid that people will label her needy, bitchy, clingy, whiny. In other words, wanty. Wanty (known in Italy as volere, on New York's shrink-saturated Upper West Side as the id) is the hobgoblin who scrambles the signals so that wanting becomes a bad thing instead of a way to move forward. His cohorts are guilt and denial; his ace up the sleeve is fear of rejection.

What if I look stupid?

What if the answer is no?

What if, what if? So goes Wanty's refrain.

Wanty should not be confused with pure Want. Pure Want is the essence of living. It's the human condition, the slender quill that pricks the sectors of the soul, stimulating yearning or envy, desire or desperation. Nor should Wanty be mistaken for his cousin, Wishy, who pines for a more unattainable horizon and subsists on fountains glutted with coins, birthday candles, and the sternum bones of most poultry. Incidentally—spoiler alert—whoever grasps the wishbone higher up toward the joint will always win.

Wanty looks daggers at Wish and Want and shames them into silence. He flicks open the refrigerator door and slams it shut, thumbs through your credit card statements reproachfully, reaches out and shakes up your mind, juddering friendly old desires into unrecognizable enemies.

Do we even allow ourselves to know what we want?

"Where should we go for dinner?" I ask my husband.

"Wherever you want," he says.

I suggest a nice barbecue place around the corner. No, he says, he doesn't feel like barbecue. Chinese? No, he had Chinese food for lunch. Italian? No, too heavy. Thai? Too much like Chinese. Where, then, I repeat, does he want to go for dinner?

"I dunno. Wherever you want."

Kill me now.

  It wasn't always this way.

via oprah.com